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A sheep farmers' daughter who became a pioneering scientist has been awarded an Australia Day honour.

Dr Bridget Ogilvie has been recognised with a Companion of the Order of Australia for her services to science in the field of biomedical research.

Her work has included helping to keep the human genome from being patented.

As a research scientist in the 1960s and 1970s, Ogilvie studied the immune response to parasites in animals and humans, and helped discover the role of a class of antibodies known as IgE.

Her interest in science was stimulated as a child growing up on a sheep farm in Glen Innes, New South Wales.

"There were a lot of diseases that knocked off our animals, bacterial diseases, and in my lifetime I saw the development of vaccines for these," she says.

"I saw how science transformed the health of the animals ... so I decided to be a scientist."

Ogilvie says she was lucky to have gone to university given the attitudes at the time.

"My father's peers thought he was quite barmy spending money on his daughter's tertiary education because they didn't even think it was necessary for sons to go beyond high school," she says.

"One time when the farm accounts were in the red ... the bank manager called him in and said, 'Look here John, why did you spend all this money on your daughter's education at university. You should be spending it on fertiliser.'"

But she says he continued to support her education and she started a research career in the newly emerging field of experimental immunology and parasitology.

Ogilvie says while women in traditional disciplines such as physiology "had a very tough time" due to established hierarchies, this was not the case in new fields with a shortage of people working in them.

Ogilvie spent all her professional life in the UK and worked for many years with the Wellcome Trust.

As director of the Trust she set up the Sanger Institute, which was involved in sequencing a third of the human genome.

Ogilvie says the well-resourced and influential institute managed to stop US attempts to patent the genome and keep data accessible to researchers in a free public database.

She says while patenting is an important way of encouraging companies to invest in new drugs, she rejects the current pressure on universities to patent their work.

"All the large pharmaceutical companies that I know really don't agree with government pressure on these things," she says. "They want universities to do the fundamental original work which they then will build on."

During her work with the World Health Organization in the mid 1970s, Ogilvie says she started working out ways to get funding for drugs to treat diseases whose sufferers were either too few or too poor to make it worthwhile for the pharmaceutical industry to develop new drugs.

Nobel prize winners Dr Barry Marshall and Dr Robin Warren will also be awarded a Companion of the Order of Australia for their services to medicine and to medical research, particularly the discovery of the bacteria Helicobacter pylori and its role in gastritis and peptic ulcer disease.